Interpretation of the subsurface geology from seismic data is made more difficult and time consuming due to constructive and destructive noise impacting the seismic data quality. The presence of strong noise makes automated interpretation techniques unusable and manual interpretation more challenging. As a result, the time required to complete interpretation is increased, the risk of deducing an incorrect interpretation of subsurface geology is elevated, and the potential of missed business opportunities can be increased.
There is at least one commercially available coherent noise removal method. The vendor is ffA Geoscience. The ffA method targets the removal of the noise and involves the following steps: (1) the input data is smoothed, (2) the structural dip is estimated from the smoothed data, and (3) a 3D structurally-steered diffusion filter is applied to the original (unsmoothed) data to mitigate the noise.